Getting ready to publish your research? Still in the early stages of research but already thinking about where you will publish? About to undertake research and thinking ahead?
Navigating publication requirements for data, code, and other supporting research output can be tricky, but the Library is here to help!
The MSK Library has launched a new homegrown resource, the Data Policy Finder.
The Data Policy Finder is a searchable database containing information and links for data, code, and materials policies. Search for data sharing and management policies by publisher or publication. Library staff review the policies and curate the database with links, direct quotes from the relevant sections of the policies, and notes to help you search, verify, and plan for your publication data requirements.
For any questions regarding this new resource or to schedule a demo, please reach out to Anthony Dellureficio, Associate Librarian, Research Data Management.
Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have developed a method to quantify tumor-specific total mRNA levels from patient tumor samples. The researchers used this method on tumors from more than 6,500 patients across 15 cancer types and found that higher mRNA levels in cancer cells were correlated with an increased risk of disease progression and poor survival. The study was published in Nature Biotechnology.
The researchers at Johns Hopkins University investigated age-related mechanisms in melanoma metastasizing. While age-related changes suppress the growth of melanoma cells in primary tumors, this new study established aging as the factor that increased the spread of cancer cells to distant organs. This multicenter study was published in Nature.
Although cancer cells can have thousands of mutations in their DNA, only some drive cancer progression. Scientists from MIT created a computer model that can quickly scan the genome of cancer cells and identify mutations that occur most frequently and thus potentially are responsible for driving tumor growth. The study was published in Nature Biotechnology.
A researcher from the University of Texas synthesized a new molecule (ERX-41) that had proved, in in-vitro and animal experiments, to be effective against a broad spectrum of hard-to-treat cancers, including triple-negative breast cancer, pancreatic and ovarian cancers, and glioblastoma. The study was published in Nature Cancer.
Cancer vaccines are on the rise as a cancer treatment modality. They work by inducing an immune response, but tumors often resist this response via an immune escape mechanism. A group of researchers from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, and other institutions created a new cancer vaccine targeting this mechanism and increasing immune antibody levels. The vaccine was studied on animals, and human trials are expected to come next. The study was published in Nature.
Systematic Review (SR) searching adopts both systematic and comprehensive approaches with the goal of retrieving, ideally, all the literature relevant to the focused question at the base of your Systematic Review. Typically, an expert searcher, such as an information professional, uses a combination of keywords qualified with field tags (e.g. [tiab] field tag in PubMed related to title and abstract fields of PubMed records) and subject headings (e.g. MeSH in PubMed and EmTree in Embase) for SR searching.
When selecting the terms for an SR, it is best to focus strictly on the terms directly related to the subject or clinical question being addressed. Occasionally it can be appropriate to expand the search to a slightly broader focus to retrieve literature where the exact subject matter may be discussed within the context of other subjects within a broader question.
An example of this expanded search: If the SR is focused on breast cancer surgery, a broader focus would be to look at any/all cancer surgeries wherein breast cancer specific surgery may be discussed.
All search approaches, whether broad or narrow, must be reflected in transparent and reproducible documented search strategies. It is important to remember that there is no “perfect” comprehensive search strategy that will only retrieve relevant citations. It is to be expected that any search, especially a comprehensive SR search, will retrieve many more citations than are actually relevant to the question being asked. Part of the SR process is excluding these irrelevant citations through multiple steps, explained in PRISMA.
However, there is another category besides relevant and irrelevant results, that is typically retrieved – these citations are related to aspects of your topic you did not consider when asking your clinical question and devising your search strategies. These “by-products” might appear important enough that they should be included in your review, but this will be deterring from your original question.
Example: Your SR is on cancer patients’ attitude to health. You devise a comprehensive search strategy and include relevant search terms. As you begin screening the retrieved citations you realize that many of the articles actually focus on health education as it relates to attitudes. You may want to simply add health education as an additional aspect of your SR since it appears to be a valuable aspect of cancer patients’ health attitudes.
The issue with this approach is that unless you backtrack and revise your clinical question and search strategies (and thus essentially starting over from the beginning), your results and conclusions would deviate from the actual question that was proposed initially. If health education was not addressed in your original clinical question and reflected in your search strategies, it would be improper to include it in the final SR as there is likely an entire body of literature that was missed and thus any systematic conclusions could not be made regarding it.
Instead, these “by-product” citations (health education articles that came up in search results for health attitudes) should be treated as irrelevant to the systematic review you are conducting. A potential solution could be mentioning in the discussion section that from this review it was discovered that education is strongly tied to cancer patients’ attitudes toward their disease and their health and that it would be worthwhile to conduct a future review looking at how education can impact these views.
Takeaway: Try not to include “by-product” topics in your final review and analysis.
